Worcester Sharks follow disaster with gem

Sunday

Feb 24, 2013 at 6:00 AM

Even the very best teams get hall passes a couple of times a year. The key is to not get them every night. The Sharks made it one-and-done with theirs this weekend. They followed up Friday night’s horrid 7-2 loss to Manchester with a sparkling 4-1 victory over the Portland Pirates here Saturday night.

By Bill Ballou TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

Even the very best teams get hall passes a couple of times a year. The key is to not get them every night.

The Sharks made it one-and-done with theirs this weekend. They followed up Friday night’s horrid 7-2 loss to Manchester with a sparkling 4-1 victory over the Portland Pirates here Saturday night.

Worcester did almost everything right against a team to which it had lost five in a row. The victory also snapped the Sharks’ seven-game winless streak at the DCU Center.

Bonneau’s goal was his first of the season, Kearns scored short-handed, and Tennyson was 1-1-2.

The Sharks chased Portland goalie Mike Lee, who was 5-0-0 heading into the game, with three goals in the first period. Stalock, in contrast, had one of his strongest games of the year, making 36 saves.

The victory was Stalock’s 73rd for Worcester, one shy of Thomas Greiss’ franchise record. “It was a really good effort,” Sommer said. “If we hadn’t responded like that after the meeting we had this morning, we would have been in trouble.”

That meeting involved looking at lots of videotape of Friday’s game, none of it very flattering.

“Sometimes,” said Matt Pelech, “when you get your (veranda) kicked, you come out even harder the next game.”

Groulx, Kearns and Bonneau scored in a span of 4:09 in the first period. It was merely the third time in 12 games the Sharks scored first, and the first time since their 5-1 victory over Bridgeport on Oct. 28 that they had a 3-0 lead after the first 20 minutes.

Groulx gave the Sharks the lead at 13:15 with a 45-foot slap shot from the left boards that went off the far post and in.

Kearns took a pass from John McCarthy and converted a short-handed breakaway at 15:25, putting a wrist shot through Lee’s skates.

At 17:24, Bonneau hopped out of the penalty box and corralled a missed Pirates slap shot that cleared the zone by itself. He approached Lee with Jon Matsumoto as a two-on-one break, then put a shot in that went off Boris Valabik’s skate.

“I knew the puck was coming my way,” Bonneau said, “but from where I was in the box, I couldn’t actually see it, then it came right to me. I could see I had a one-on-one, then I saw (Matsumoto) and I tried to get it over to him.”

Kearns’ goal was Worcester third short-handed goal of the season, but first at the DCU Center in months, and almost years. The previous one had been scored by McCarthy in a 3-2 victory over Bridgeport on Nov. 11, 2011.

It seems like teams that score short-handed almost always win, for some reason. “I think,” McCarthy said, “that it might mean something like that you are really dialed in that night.”

Tennyson put a wrist shot past replacement goalie Louis Domingue late in the second period to give the Sharks a 4-0 lead, then the Pirates swarmed around Stalock in the third. Portland outshot Worcester, 15-9, in the final 20 minutes.

Lane scored at 4:47, a little more than a minute after Stalock made a pair of timely saves that kept it 4-0. Chris Brown had a breakaway at 3:20 and not only did Stalock turn him aside, he held his ground and stopped the rebound as well.

It wasn’t the only big rebound of the night. The Sharks had a 60-minute one, coming back from one of their worst games of the season with one of their best.

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